The Source's Son
by Silesia
Summary: Phoebe's been dead for a year. What about the people she left behind?


The Source's Son

by Calliope

  
  


Diclaimer: I own nothing here. I won't even try to claim the parts I made up. It all belongs to the lucky people who own Charmed. I'm just borrowing a few characters.

  
  


Author's Note: Last Thursday's episode made me so mad. I thought it very possible they might kill Cole off, but I never honestly thought they'd do it. This is sort of my reaction to that.

  
  


The Source's Son 

  
  


Colin Halliwell sank to his knees beside his mother's grave, the first time he'd been there without being surrounded by his aunts, his uncle, and his step-father. In his clenched fists were the crumpled flowers he had planned to leave. 

Phoebe Halliwell, the marker read. His mother. A part of Colin still couldn't believe she was dead.

Any outside observer of the Halliwell family would probably have been able to guess that Phoebe would be the first to die. She was the one who always seemed distracted, even melancholy, and always walking around as if she knew she should be somewhere else, with someone else. She had felt next to no regard for the life she lived, and sometimes went so far as to say that the innocents were the only thing she had left. It always hurt when she said that. It hurt her son, it hurt her sisters, and it hurt Tom. Tom, the man she married to replace the one she killed. Tom, the man who adored her endlessly, yet couldn't help but disappoint her. Yes, it should have been obvious that Phoebe would be the one to die first, but Colin never saw it. His mother had lived through so much, and he always thought anyone who'd survived as she had was strong enough to outlive those around her. Yes, she had been so strong.

Phoebe, strong. But that could have been wishful thinking. 

And that's the ugly part of me, he thought. He wanted strength from his mother. Yes, he knew all about the part of him that craved power, the part that he got from his father. The part his mother hated.

She had hated it, and he knew it. That . . . evil power inside him that used to remind her everyday of what destroyed the man named Cole. But it all worked out pretty well. By the time Colin had been old enough to comprehend his mother's fear, he was smart enough to realize that she had never feared him; she feared the son of the Source. The Colin in him wasn't the one who had to worry about hate, and the demon blood in him thrived on it. It all fit together perfectly.

And Colin did have evil magic. Oh yes, he had power- but he never used it around Aunt Piper or Aunt Paige, and especially not around his mother. But he did have to use it; if he didn't, the urge to use it escalated to the urge to kill. He couldn't let that happen, so he summoned it- but he couldn't bring the fire around his family. It had broken his mother's heart when she had vanquished his father, and it would have broken the rest of her if she had needed to destroy her son. He couldn't be the cause of more weeping. And the son of Cole had never had any doubts, that if the charmed ones knew of the temptation of his power, and how he gloried in the feel of fire in his hand, they'd think he had become like his father. But he hadn't. There was one fundamental difference between Colin and Cole.

Colin carried more than evil. True, he couldn't utilize his good magic, but he could pass it on, should he ever have a daughter. He was a Halliwell.

A human's will was a constant battle, good vs evil, and it was the same with the late man known as Cole. Whereas right can easily prevail against wrong if a human makes the right choices, Cole had to deal with another, magical half that was bent on destroying the good in him. But Colin had magic of both types. The sides were evenly drawn, just like in everyone else.

He used to wonder why his father's love for Phoebe Halliwell couldn't save Cole from his power. Colin had actually gone so far as to summon a lower-level demon to ask. Colin's guest kneeled in mock-respect and sneered, saying that the Source's love had not only failed to save him, it had destroyed him. It had made him weak.

"But," Phoebe's son had continued, "I didn't mean the Source. The Source loved no one. I meant my father."

The demon rose from his knee in disgust. "The Source was what mattered. The human in him killed him." Then Colin sent him away.

But his question was still unanswered, so he had finally just asked his aunts- he couldn't ask his mother- and prayed it wouldn't upset them. 

"Why couldn't their feelings save him?" he had asked, barely old enough to understand the magnitude of his question. But Aunt Piper and Aunt Paige answered him. They told him it did save him. They still remembered the way Cole came from the depths of his mind, overcoming the evil inside him, even while burning alive. He had looked at Phoebe Halliwell with sadness, faith, pride, and most of all, love. He tried to remove her guilt. "I will always love you," he had said. But his efforts were in vain.

Colin still remembered, vaguely, the years of his early childhood, when his mother had cried for hours on end. She could barely bring herself to save innocents in those days, for she truly believed they'd be better off dead than in this world. Still, she did her duty. But she couldn't forgive herself for vanquishing her husband.

Then she met Tom Olson. The charmed ones were guarding an innocent, a young woman who lay in the hospital in a coma, and Olson was her doctor. He resembled Cole a little, perhaps too much for a relationship to be healthy, and in a mistake Phoebe would soon regret, she and Tom eloped.

Colin had to give his step-father credit. When Phoebe brought her husband home, Tom had to learn a great deal about his new family, and the powerful magic they wielded. He never ran. He stuck by his wife, and never stopped loving her. 

Still, he had come close to leaving, once- when he found the true nature of his new wife's son. That had also been the one time Colin had wished he were normal, wished he had never felt the touch of fire. But Tom stayed.

Colin rather liked Tom. They respected each other, if only for Phoebe.

When she finally reached past her guilt, Phoebe knew she'd made a horrible mistake, knew how unfair she'd been to Tom. But by then, she couldn't leave him, couldn't release him. He loved her hopelessly, but even more, she'd come to love him too. Not the way she had loved Cole, but what she had with Tom was all she could hope for now, and she couldn't give it up.

  
  


~*~

  
  


Colin brushed the dirt away from the gravestone where his mother's name was carved, bringing small bursts of fire to sharpen the edges of the letters, and placed the flowers reverently in front. The power of three was broken now, but Aunt Piper and Aunt Paige were safe. They would never know, but Colin had met the new Source. The underworld had seen a long succession of rulers since his father's death, but it looked like this one was strong enough to stay. He wasn't really a traditional type- he didn't seem to believe that all former Sources needed to be out of the way. The new Source believed that anyone who hadn't been coronated was an upstart- but Phoebe Halliwell had been a queen, and Colin would have grown in to power. This new Source seemed to believe their position deserved a certain amount of respect, and by extension, so did the rest of the family. In fact, Phoebe's killer had been quickly punished.

That didn't mean the Halliwells wouldn't be needed to save innocents- just that no high-level demons could come near them.

Colin wondered if he'd be seeing his mother any time soon, up in the attic where his family could see his grandmother, and his great-grandmother. He'd even seen his father there once, a merely human ghost, right after he'd summoned the demon. Colin had never told anyone about that meeting, and Cole never came to anyone else, not even Phoebe. 

Colin had listened to his father. "Fighting it- " and Colin knew exactly what it was "-can be very difficult, son," Cole had said, savoring the word son, with an attempt at a smile that slowly grew more serious. "But you have to do it, you have to succeed, and- I wish you didn't have to feel the . . . confusion. Just don't ever give in to it. Don't ever force the people you love to choose."

And then he had left.

At the time, Colin hadn't understood his father's message at all. But as he looked at his mother's grave, remembering her life, he also recalled how few moments of joy he'd caught her in. He was honored that he'd been the cause of some of those moments, and ashamed that, over the years, he'd caused her a great deal of worry. 

She'd felt guilty for so long. She hadn't just vanquished her husband- she had hated a full part of him, the demon in him. She'd hated that he made her destroy him. 

And much as she had loved them, it took her years to forgive her sisters for coming that day, for bringing the situation to a head, when she might have continued pretending that she could have a happy ending. They forced her to choose. She had wanted everything, but when she went after it, she lost.

Phoebe's son remembered her funeral, almost a year before. The lid had been up, and everyone could see her face. She'd looked so young, not yet forty, and so beautiful- more exquisite and more at peace than she'd seemed in over a decade. It was almost as if, in death, she'd finally found what she had lost when Cole died.

She had probably found him now, Colin knew. And he also knew that this could never, ever happen again. Colin would never make a woman he loved feel such pain and confusion, and she wouldn't need to wait for death to find peace. There had to be some good to this whole situation. How ironic, he thought, that the child of the Source must see to it.

He stood, and then, with a last glance at his mother's grave, he walked away. 


End file.
